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> Git is slow on large repos, even on an SSD.

Maybe on Windows, but then everything is slow on Windows. On my 2015-era machine `git pull` on the Linux kernel source tree is nearly instantaneous after the remote objects are downloaded. Same with `git status`, `git diff`, etc. I mean, that's what it was developed for, because everything else was slow.



How about `git status`?

The first SSD I bought back in 2008 was to put a large git repo on it; it helped. With much larger repos, like those I had to work with at Facebook, even an NVMe drive becomes a bit uncomfortable, and one has to use something like Watchman [1] to track changes without a rather noticeable delay.

[1]: https://github.com/facebook/watchman


Facebook uses mercurial across the board, at least from what I saw a couple years back. A good chunk of the large file / large repo has been open sourced as EdenFS [1] which uses file notifications to update the status as you make changes to amortize the cost so that it’s already computed by the time you query (watchman is integrated). That being said, very few code bases grow to this size unless you are a major tech company and have a single mono repo (with a few major OSS projects as notable counter examples).

[1] https://github.com/facebookexperimental/eden


This is correct! Sorry. It's sometimes better to sleep in the middle of a night than to post. So embarrassing.






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